Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads: A Google Data Studio template and tutorial

TL;DR: If you’re already familiar with Google Data Studio, steal this Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads dashboard template with pride. For more tips on how to improve the performance of your Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns, keep reading.

Not sure if you should invest more in Google Ads or Facebook Ads?

Here’s the thing: comparing Google Ads to Facebook Ads isn’t always straightforward. After all, your audience uses the platforms for different purposes and they have different targeting options.

So instead of beating yourself up and guessing which channel brings higher ROAS, why don’t you run a few experiments and let the results speak for themselves? 

In this post, I’m going to show you how to build a Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads comparison dashboard in Google Data Studio to help you pick the right channel to invest in.

Let’s get right into it.

Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads comparison dashboard in Google Data Studio

Just a reminder before we start: you should only do fair comparisons between similar campaigns.

For example, don’t try to compare the results of a brand awareness campaign on Facebook to the results of a conversion-focused campaign on Google Ads.

The Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads comparison dashboard consists of two pages:

• Performance overview
• Audience demographics

Now, let’s take a look at each page and see how you can use these insights to improve your campaigns.

Performance overview

The first page of this dashboard gives you an overview into the performance of both channels. You’ll see:

• Which channel gives you better ROAS (return on ad spend)
• How much you’re spending on Google Ads and Facebook Ads
• Which campaigns work best and on which channel

At the top of this dashboard, you’ll find scorecards and sparkline charts representing the most important metrics like click-through-rate (CTR), cost per conversion, and cost per click (CPC).

CTR is an important metric for assessing the quality of your ad. When your ad is attractive and relevant to your audience, you should see a high CTR.

CPC tells you how much you’re paying for every click on your ad. It can help you adjust your budget and bidding strategy on both platforms.

Cost per conversion shows how much you’re paying for every conversion and whether you’re breaking even. For example, if your product costs $20 but you spend $30 to acquire each new customer, you aren’t breaking even from the first purchase.

However, if you’re running ads for a subscription business or you have a lot of returning ecommerce customers, this may not be an issue. Use common sense and the lifetime value data you have at your disposal to determine whether your advertising budget is well spent.

Next, you’ll see donut charts showing how your costs, impressions, clicks, and conversions are split between Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These insights can help you decide which platform brings better ROAS.

Let’s say your campaigns on Google Ads cost more but don’t generate as many conversions as you expected. Meanwhile, you’re seeing lots of conversions from a Facebook Ads campaign. In this case, consider allocating more budget to Facebook Ads to improve the results.

At the bottom of this dashboard, there’s a table showing cost, impressions, clicks, CTR, website conversions, and conversion rate per campaign. From here, you can easily spot campaigns that are underperforming.

Now, let’s move on to the audience demographics page.

Demographics

Audience demographics help you understand who the people who’ve seen your ads are and how they found you.

On the top of the page, you’ll find maps showing where your audience comes from.

Next, there are bar charts showing clicks split by device and age.

So how can you improve your campaign performance with audience demographics insights?

For example, if you’re running a geo specific campaign, you can easily see where you’re getting most of your clicks and double down on that location. 

You can cross reference your target audience between Facebook and Google. For example, if you’re seeing lots of conversions from the UK on Google, you can experiment with targeting people in the UK on Facebook as well.

Get started with the template

If you’re new to Google Data Studio, feel free to use our template as a starting point.

First, open the template and click “Use template.”

Click on the “New data source” drop-down menu and choose “Create new data source.”

On the connector library, search for a connector called “Ad data + Google Analytics by Supermetrics.”

Connect and authorize all the ad accounts you want to pull data from. In this case, they’re Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Google Analytics. Then click “Connect.”

(Psst! Authorizing the data source will automatically start your free 14-day trial of Supermetrics for Data Studio.)

After that, click “Add to report” → “Copy report”

And there you go. Your Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads comparison dashboard is ready!

If you want to share the dashboard with your team, client, or manager, simply click “Share” and then enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the report with.

I hope you’ll find some valuable insights with this template.

If you need any help, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Happy optimizing! ✌️